hi infestor,they are unrelated, the move to gnome3 (if your lmde setup is following the UP policy) that is coming soon with UP4 is not incompatible with MATE:- MATE is a gnome2 fork, forked from the base code so that it can be installable in the same system side-by-side with gnome3 (among other reasons << but i highlight this one here)

And Clem said already several times that Mint has a commitment with Mate

Bamm Says:March 27th, 2012 at 4:31 am

Do you plan to keep on developing Mate until it achieves the full elegance of Gnome 2? I wanna use Mate forever. I hope that in a few weeks time, Mint with Mate becomes as good or better than Mint with Gnome 2 ever was. I hope this is what the Mint team has in mind as well. Kudos to the developers.

(I ask because all the focus and media mileage has been on Cinnamon)

Edit by Clem: Not all of it. Cinnamon impresses because it’s new and because we re-factored the code and that allowed us to make a lot of changes quite fast (we didn’t care about losing Shell functionalities or to rewrite some of them from scratch… in MATE we can’t afford to lose anything). There’s also the fact that Shell is further away from what we want of a desktop than MATE so it requires much more development… MATE, from day one, was almost already there since it started from Gnome 2, and only had stability issues to worry about. With that said, the MATE team’s been extremely active, you can follow what they’re doing on gitub and their IRC channel, they’re always very active.. not to mention the amount of work done by Stefano-k on the packaging. I haven’t been personally involved in the code within the MATE team but we’re fully supporting this project and giving it everything it needs, exposure, hosting, technical help, guidance, MATE is very important to us. As for the media, I’m not sure they’re appreciating the importance of MATE… Unity, Shell and Cinnamon have to prove themselves and gain new audiences, MATE just has to work well to immediately become the de-facto continuation of the #1 most popular Linux desktop.

Thanks for pointing out that Blog post, ZZ. It convinced me to give MATE another look. The last time I tried it was very early in the development, and I was less than impressed. Now that it has been released as the default desktop for LMDE I decided today to give it another go. I installed the RC iso, reset the sources.list to Testing, and all I can say is "Wow!". I am really impressed with how close to Gnome 2 MATE has become in both looks and performance. This setup flies in comparison to the LMDE KDE that I tweaked together, so it now sits on my primary partition for daily use. Again, thanks for drawing my attention to it ZZ, and a big thanks to Clem and the team for placing a high priority on MATE.